Imagine having the chutzpah to call out your own employer on national television for doing some underhanded crapola in order to weasel its way out of utter embarrassment. That’s what Scott Jennings did to CNN for trying to dial back its months-long gas price scareporn.
Jennings took CNN to task for removing its obnoxious gas price tracker from "on-screen" prominence and website homepage during the June 25 edition of The Source with Kaitlan Collins.
As host Collins sat there with her typical smirk, Jennings put the network on blast: “Look, gas prices are not up. They’re down! Oil is trading at $71 a barrel. We don’t run the gas price tracker on-screen anymore for a reason, you know? I mean, because it’s a non-story.” WABC Radio reported as April 8 — the last day the website page for the tracker was updated — that the network had scrubbed the ticker from the home screen as its agitprop over “$5 a gallon of gas” failed to materialize.
CNN senior reporter Matt Egan, who ran point on the digital doom-mongering, boosted the “Memorial Day sticker shock” May 20 and regurgitated the following: “Patrick De Haan, GasBuddy’s head of petroleum analysis, told CNN he expects the national average for regular gas will hit $5 a gallon at some point next month if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed.” Just a month and a week later, and that prediction aged like a carton of milk left out on the kitchen counter in a house with no air-conditioning. And passage through Strait of Hormuz is still under dispute.
.@ScottJenningsKY calling out his own employer @CNN for its underhanded shenanigans in dialing down the gas price scareporn hoping no one would notice is must-see TV. Of course Kaitlin Collins deflects from the point and argues a strawman. pic.twitter.com/vRJ6Q2WWxi
— Joe Vazquez (@JV3MRC) June 29, 2026
AAA reported June 29 that the current national average for a gallon of “regular unleaded” is $3.86, which is a sharp decline from the same date a month ago at $4.39, despite the ongoing U.S.-Iran conflict . Here’s another factoid: None of the spikes eclipsed the highest recorded average gas price that was logged during President Joe Biden’s term at $5.02 a gallon, and that was without an international war to boot.
Collins, of course, tried to deflect away from Jennings’ point and argued a “muh, but Trump” strawman over the president’s parroting of a Biden-era talking point accusing “Big Oil” of price gouging. “I mean, the president doesn't think they're a nonstory because he was sounding like president Biden yesterday saying that these companies are gouging people,” she snorted. That literally had nothing to do with Jennings’ point, precisely because prices are in fact falling against CNN’s Chicken Little-ing to the contrary — all underscored by the network putting the whammy on prominently displaying its gas tracker like a daily gotcha against the president.
Whether the president thought prices were dropping fast enough was irrelevant. The real story was CNN quietly dialing back the very narrative it had aggressively pushed for months. But don’t expect Collins to admit it.
